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Crisis Communication Best Practices: Some Quibbles and Additions Peter M. Sandman Published online: 17 Feb 2007.

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Crisis Communication Best Practices: Some Quibbles and Additions Peter M. Sandman

The National Center for Food Protection and Defense’s (NCFPD) effort to codify a

list of ten best practices in crisis communication is a good starting point for a much

needed debate. I had an opportunity to comment on an earlier draft of the paper, and

I welcome this second bite of the apple.

Three Kinds of Risk Communication

Let me start with some terminological clarification. I see crisis communication as one

of three quite separate risk communication traditions:

1. When people are insufficiently concerned about a serious hazard, the task is to

warn them*the domain of what I call ‘‘precaution advocacy.’’ The best practices rightly equate this with the health communication tradition; there is also a parallel

safety communication literature. The main problem here is grabbing the attention

of an uninterested audience, then using that attention to arouse concern and thus

motivate precaution-taking.

2. When people are excessively concerned about a small hazard, the task is to reassure

them. I call this ‘‘outrage management.’’ The term ‘‘risk communication’’ arose in

this context*in 1980s environmental controversies*but has since expanded to incorporate all three of my categories. Corporate communicators often refer to

outrage management as ‘‘crisis communication’’ because high public concern can

be a reputational and profitability crisis for the company. The best practices follow

them in this, I think mistakenly.

3. When people are appropriately concerned about a serious hazard, the task is

to help them bear it and to guide them through it. This is the true paradigm of

crisis communication. In a crisis, people are genuinely endangered and rightly

upset.

Peter M. Sandman, Ph.D., is a risk communication consultant based in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Jody Lanard

contributed to this commentary. Correspondence to: Peter M. Sandman, 59 Ridgeview Road, Princeton, NJ

08540, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0090-9882 (print)/ISSN 1479-5752 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/00909880600771619

Journal of Applied Communication Research

Vol. 34, No. 3, August 2006, pp. 257 �262

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Of course, reality isn’t that simple. In any specific crisis, some people may be

insufficiently concerned while others are appropriately concerned; some may even be

excessively concerned. The same people may be excessively concerned about some

aspects of the crisis, and appropriately or insufficiently concerned about other

aspects. In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, for example, many people mistakenly

believed that dead bodies or recently caught fish might carry diseases; their worries

that aftershocks might produce another tsunami were technically sounder. Thus, a

crisis communicator may need to undertake different sorts of risk communication at

the same time.

How much concern the situation justifies is itself a debatable decision. The same

situation may lead a government agency to do crisis communication (trying to help

people cope with their justified concern and the risk that provokes it), a company to

do outrage management (trying to diminish people’s concern), and an activist group

to do precaution advocacy (trying to arouse further concern).

Tolerating and Igniting Fear, Especially Before the Crisis

All this about ‘‘concern’’ points to a central focus in crisis communication, one that I

think the best practices neglect: the role of emotion, especially the role of fear. (Other

relevant emotions include misery, hurt, guilt, and anger.) How much fear is most

conducive to taking appropriate precautions in a crisis? Too much fear can (rarely)

escalate into panic or (more commonly) get deflected into denial. But too little fear

won’t do the trick either. And ‘‘concern’’ is probably too little fear. We are concerned

about many things; in a crisis, it would be wise for us to put our concerns aside for

the duration, not just add a new concern to the pile. What we need is fear itself. Try

rereading the previous section of this commentary and replacing ‘‘concern’’ with

‘‘fear’’ and ‘‘concerned’’ with ‘‘fearful.’’ If you have trouble with phrases like

‘‘appropriately fearful’’ and ‘‘insufficiently fearful’’ (while ‘‘excessively fearful’’ strikes

you as almost redundant), you may suffer from fear of fear.

If the crisis itself arouses fear*as it often does*the job of the crisis communicator is to help us bear our fear, and to guide the choice of precautionary

actions our fear motivates. The best practices rightly include self-efficacy messages

(#10); people can bear their fear better when they have actions to take, believe the

actions will help, and feel competent to take them. But the best practices would

benefit from a more explicit recommendation to tolerate people’s fear. The Holy Grail

of crisis communicators is to get people to take precautions without frightening

them. This is like trying to write a novel without using the letter ‘‘e’’; it may be

possible, but it’s certainly a handicap. Official fear of fear is a huge handicap in crisis

communication.

The best practices come closest to addressing this issue by urging crisis

communicators to partner with the public (#3) and listen to the public’s concerns

(#4). These two sections focus largely on the wisdom of accepting people’s concerns

as ‘‘legitimate’’ and ‘‘their reality’’ even if these concerns are not technically sound. I

agree, but that’s mostly an outrage management issue. The big crisis communication

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issue is to help people bear fears that are technically sound, and to help them harness

these fears in the form of appropriate precautionary action.

I’ll go further. In addition to tolerating people’s fears, crisis communicators

sometimes need to help ignite them. This is especially the case in pre-crisis

communication. If the purpose of fear is to motivate precautions, after all, then

the fear must come before the precautions are needed. This should be self-evident, yet

officials and journalists are often critical of what seems to them premature

fearfulness. (The New York Times once headlined that ‘‘Fear Is Spreading Faster

than SARS’’*as if it weren’t supposed to.) People who have gone through a fearful ‘‘adjustment reaction’’ before a crisis begins are better prepared to cope with the

crisis, emotionally as well as logistically.

Pre-crisis communication*arguably a hybrid of precaution advocacy and crisis communication*is missing from the best practices. The best practices rightly advise crisis communicators to do advance planning (#2), but nowhere does the list

advise them to do advance communication . . . so the public can do its own advance planning (and help with yours). When I advise clients on their crisis communication

plans, one of the things I ask them to do is to imagine that the crisis has just begun

and to make a list of things they will then wish the public had already learned or

already done. That list is a good start on a pre-crisis communication agenda.

One major reason why officials neglect pre-crisis communication is fear of fear. In

the summer and fall of 2005, I participated in months of agonizing debate by U.S.

government communicators over how aggressively to warn the public about a

possible influenza pandemic. A heartfelt reluctance to frighten people was one of the

oft-repeated reasons to avoid emphatic pandemic warnings.

Respecting and Trusting the Public

I think it is impossible to do risk communication without first making a more or less

explicit judgment about whether your audience is insufficiently, appropriately, or

excessively concerned/fearful. But making the judgment doesn’t require expressing

contempt for those who disagree. More important still, it doesn’t require expressing

contempt for the audience itself. Ridiculing people as apathetic or hysterical seldom

helps propel them to the desired level of emotional arousal; neither does it motivate

them to follow your guidance on recommended precautions.

Failure to respect the public is a consistent problem in crisis communication. You

can see it most vividly, perhaps, in officials’ attitudes toward precautions. The best

practices section on self-efficacy (#10) focuses on offering people things to do. The

list mentions, but does not stress sufficiently, offering them choices of things to do,

thus drawing on their ability to decide, not just their ability to act. And the best

practices don’t even mention the possibility that they might come up with their own

precautions. When people do come up with their own precautions, official reactions

tend to be patronizing or hostile. Some people responded to the anthrax attacks by

seeking a prescription for Cipro or spraying their mail with ammonia; some people

responded to the SARS outbreaks by wearing masks or avoiding Chinese restaurants.

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These intuitive, emotionally useful responses vary in their technical usefulness. What

seems to be invariant is the official preference for public obedience over public

autonomy. (The same experts who inveigh against wearing masks in public to prevent

the spread of infectious diseases urge people to cover their mouths when they cough.

They seem not to notice that masks cover the mouth*or that it is hard to cover your mouth without a mask while standing on a bus, one hand clutching your briefcase or

pocketbook and the other holding onto the pole or strap.)

Several of the best practices’ solid recommendations are defended in ways that I

find a little lacking in respect for the public. The best practices’ advice to partner with

the public (#3), for example, focuses on the need for sources to share what they

know. Not mentioned is the possibility that sources need to learn what the public

knows. The World Health Organization routinely learns of new health crises by

monitoring the rumor mills, long before it gets official confirmation from national

governments. When citizens are asked to comment on government emergency

response plans (which happens all too seldom), their responses don’t just

demonstrate that they have ‘‘concerns’’ the planners need to take into consideration;

they also point to real, substantive flaws in the plans themselves.

Similarly, the best practices talk several times about ‘‘trust’’ and ‘‘credibility,’’ always

in the context of how to ensure that the public will trust officials. The best practices

recommend, for example, that crisis communicators listen to people’s concerns (#4)

in order to foster trust and credibility. But trust is two-way. A crisis communication

best practice that is missing from the list is to trust the public: to trust that most

people are resilient and can bear dire warnings, awful events, and unpleasant truths;

to trust that they will want to do the right thing, and that preparing to make good use

of volunteers is thus a central part of crisis planning; to trust that their ideas about

how best to cope with the crisis are likely to be worth hearing, worth implementing,

and worth letting them implement.

Coordinated Messaging Is Vastly Overrated

The only one of the ten recommendations that I actually disagree with is the advice to

‘‘collaborate and coordinate with credible sources’’ (#6). I have no quarrel with

collaboration, but I do dispute the wisdom of trying to coordinate a single, credible

message. This section seems to envision a coalition of all whose knowledge is sound

and whose hearts are pure: getting together well in advance of the crisis, staying

together throughout the crisis, and putting out a consistent message that will be clear

and credible because it is invariant. This is conventional advice*the term of art is ‘‘speak with one voice’’*and I can’t fault this strategy as a best practice. But I dissent from the customary view that ‘‘speak with one voice’’ is optimal crisis communica-

tion. And even if it were optimal, I very much doubt that it is achievable in most

crisis situations.

Of course, if there is no significant disagreement among the players about what’s

happening and how best to handle it, then ‘‘speak with one voice’’ is a no-brainer. But

I’ve never encountered a crisis where that was true. Usually, there is considerable

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disagreement, so best practice #5, ‘‘Honesty, candor, and openness,’’ is in direct

conflict with #6. So is #9, ‘‘Accept uncertainty and ambiguity.’’

Also in direct conflict with #6 is my contention that crisis communicators should

trust the public. The impulse to speak with one voice is grounded in the conviction

that people can’t handle expert disagreement.

In the run-up to the U.S. smallpox vaccination program, the CDC considered the

possibility of bringing together all the experts on vaccination side effects in order to

wrestle them into a consensus (that is, compromise) estimate of how many ‘‘adverse

events’’ were to be expected per million people vaccinated. Ultimately, the decision

was made not to do so. Speaking with one voice on this matter would hardly have

been candid, since there was considerable dissensus among the experts; it would have

aimed at hiding the uncertainty instead of acknowledging it. In addition, the

consensus number would inevitably have turned out to be mistaken. And long before

it did so, journalists would have been writing stories about how this or that expert

was pressured to sign onto a less alarming estimate than the one he or she had

previously published. (If no reporter had gone after the story, one of the experts

would probably have leaked it. ‘‘Speak with one voice’’ leads to a lot of leaking and a

lot of passive-aggressive acting out. People don’t like having to fake consensus.)

Here’s another reason not to try to speak with one voice on matters that are

genuinely debatable. Usually, the only way you can make it work is by excluding the

dissident voices from your coalition (presumably on the grounds that they are not

‘‘credible’’). This has many costs, but I’ll mention only the two biggest. First, your

crisis management team loses the benefit of those dissident voices; enforced

homogeneity leads to worse decision making. Second, the excluded dissidents have

a field day in the media; their voices sound more credible in contrast to the

homogenized message coming from the establishment sources.

By all means, share information widely, with the actors you can’t stand as well as

the ones you consider ‘‘credible.’’ By all means, work out any trivial differences in

wording that might otherwise be mistaken for differences of opinion. Where there are

actual differences of opinion, feel free to coordinate what you say about those

differences; it’s worthwhile showing the public that you’re aware of them, that each

side respects the other, that the disagreement isn’t keeping you from taking action,

and that you wish (as they do) that the answer were obvious but sadly it isn’t. Don’t

try to hide the differences in the name of coordination.

Easier Said than Done

My final comment on the best practices may be the most important. In an article as

short as this, with only a few paragraphs on each of the best practices, they come out

sounding pretty abstract but also pretty obvious*so obvious, in fact, that the reader may fail to notice that they are extremely difficult to implement and very seldom

accomplished. They’re not so much best practices as they are aspirational goals. Any

reader whose overall response is, ‘‘Yeah, we do most of that,’’ has been ill-served by

the article. Odds are you don’t. Almost nobody does.

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The best practices wisely concede that candor and openness are tougher goals than

honesty (#5). But in fact, all ten of these recommendations are tough. They fly in the

face of organizational culture, of individual ego, of technical hubris. Above all, they

fly in the face of the well-meaning but mistaken conviction that the public, like the

crisis itself, needs to be ‘‘managed.’’

As the various commentaries exemplify, there are still some significant areas of

dispute among those who claim to know how to do crisis communication. It is worth

the effort to hash out these differences and keep trying to produce lists of consensus

best practices*although it will come as no surprise that I think the areas of dissensus should also be codified, not papered over. But our disagreements about the best

practices in crisis communication pale to insignificance beside the huge gap between

our shared recommendations and the actual practices of most practitioners.

This is probably the most fruitful area for further research. Are we consultants and

academic experts hopelessly idealistic and impractical, or are practitioners mired in

outmoded and unfruitful habits? What are the barriers to implementing these best

practices? Which of the barriers are inherent in the crisis situation itself? Which are

characteristics of how crisis managers perceive the situation? (Like the public, crisis

managers are prisoners of their perceptions*for example, the perception that people will panic if they are told the unadorned truth.) Do we need fallback positions that

are more implementable than our theoretical best practices? Do we need new ways of

talking*and listening*to practitioners? Is the very phrase ‘‘best practices’’ part of the problem, implying as it does that we

know what they should do? This sounds embarrassingly like the way crisis managers

think of the public. It should not be the way crisis communication experts think of

the crisis managers.

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